Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of how national museums and galleries treat the copyright status of exact digital reproductions of two-dimensional artworks that are in the public domain.

According to case law, a work will only be protected by copyright if it is original, in the sense that is the author’s ‘own intellectual creation’. It is questionable whether an unaltered reproduction of an existing work where copyright has expired could satisfy this criterion if there has been no (or very limited) scope for the creator to exercise free creative choices. However, this will depend on the individual facts of the case.

The Government has made no assessment of how cultural heritage institutions treat the copyright status of such reproductions in practice.